PiPhone: DIY Raspberry Pi-based smartphone

Tired of carrying around a smartphone that you didn’t build with your own hands? Soon your worries may be over.

Hacker Dave Hunt has built a working smartphone out of a Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, a GSM module, a battery, and a few other components. The end result is a DIY smartphone which you can build for about $158 in parts… and that includes $40 for a Raspberry Pi model B.

He’s also written some custom software you can use to make calls using the PiPhone, but recommends advanced users develop their own since his is “not very clean.”

All told, you could get a cheaper phone with a more powerful processor and no assembly required by walking into a local phone shop. It’d also be an awful lot thinner. But it’s kind of crazy that we’ve reached the point where you can buy a few off-the-shelf components and assemble your own smartphone for under $200.

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The modular phone has arrived!

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4 years ago

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bbkm

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This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a very long time!

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4 years ago

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kr00lplatinum

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Holy crap dude that’s effin awesome! I’m so jealous, I don’t have time to tinker, and don’t know enough about the software side to even follow someone else’s instructions, but I hope to entice my son to get into it, gonna show him some vids and buy him some parts :p

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4 years ago

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John Morris

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Nice hack, not too practical though. I have a Blu Tango in my pocket that I bought for $70 new in the box without signing a contract… a few months shy of three years ago. It meets or exceeds this in every spec except battery capacity but I suspect it gets equal or better run time. And it was trivial to gain root on it so other than the closed video driver it is about as open.

The Pi was obsolete when introduced and is falling farther behind the curve by the day. At least it is now the only ARM based platform with semi-open video… but a CPU so obsolete you can’t find many distros to run the open video driver.

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4 years ago

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anonymous

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I’d take a reverse engineered open source GPU driver over what Broadcom have delivered with the Raspberry Pi.

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4 years ago

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blacksmith_tb

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Seems like it would be more practical to build it into a landline phone (a la the old Sparkfun cell and BT rotary phone conversions), then you could leave it plugged in…

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4 years ago

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Cal Rankin

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Since size is a bit of an inhibitor to mobility, you could make it into a carphone!

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4 years ago

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Galactus Schroeder

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